 We're going to move to our next session now in which we are going to start considering different responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, and I believe we will next hear from Professor sacks on his chapter for reasons for the Asia Pacific success in suppressing COVID-19. Great. Thanks very much Lara, and thanks for that wonderful presentation we just heard. I think one of the most dramatic and in some ways puzzling aspects of this past year is the hugely differing outcomes of this pandemic in terms of the nature of its transmission and mortality rates. And I will just put up one picture if I might, which is the death rates per million population in the world as of yesterday's data. And what you can see is the world experience with this pandemic has been vastly, vastly different with the highest death rates in Western Europe, the United States and Latin America, and much, much lower death rates in Asia and in Africa. So, this raises huge puzzles, and they're certainly not solved by any means. What accounts for the fact that the world's richest regions, the United States and Europe did so badly, usually when we look at a map the hardest hit regions are the poorest regions. Here it's exactly the reverse. It is the richest regions, the regions with the full hospital systems and so on, that ended up a disasterously, and to put some numbers on this as of yesterday, there were 541,000 deaths in the United States, cumulatively counted attributed to COVID-19. In China by contrast, there were 4,800 deaths. So roughly 1,000th, I'm sorry, 100th of the number, and with China having a four time larger population, that means roughly a 1,400th the mortality rate in China compared to the United States. In the UK, there were 126,000 deaths. So per million in the US, 1,600 per million dead. In the UK, 1,800 per million dead, whereas in China, 3 per million. In South Korea, 33 per million, a 50th of the US and UK levels, Australia 36 per million, New Zealand 5 per million. So what can account for these differences? Well, partly structure of demography and probably structure of social contacts day by day can explain some of this. Africa's population and South Asia's population is much younger, and we know that the mortality rates are far higher for people over the age of 65 than below the age of 65. If you do an age adjusted mortality rate analysis, you find out that you would expect all other things equal for Africa to have about 1,10th the mortality rate per person of the US and Europe. So, without question, age structure matters. Comorbidities matter a lot also. We know that overweight and obesity is a huge comorbidity with COVID-19, and the populations in Europe and especially the United States are overweight to a very high extent with much, much lower overweight and obesity in other parts of the world. But even accounting for these structural variables, one could add in urban and rural because it seems that transmission intensities are lower in rural areas because of lower density and also because of more outdoor contacts relative to indoor contacts, and even controlling for these structural variables, there is a dramatic puzzle with regard to the Asia Pacific region, which for our purposes is China, Korea, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and the countries of ASEAN, the 10 countries, especially Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand, which have had very, very low mortality rates per capita. Structural differences in demography do not account for the differences with Europe and the United States. Also, urban versus rural do not account for the differences. Comorbidities do not account for the differences. There's just, in addition to all of those clear structural factors, which do help to explain the situation in Africa, for example, something more is going on. And several of the papers in the World Happiness Report this year tackle that question. So what is that added that's going on? Clearly, in part, it is the policy response that the Asia Pacific countries were more pried to react to the news of a new SARS-like disease because they had confronted SARS in 2003. And they had had more preparedness for other emerging viruses since then, H1N1, though that was a global pandemic, there was more preparedness and response. The Mears virus, which hit in East Asia in 2014, 2015, again, primed the Asia Pacific region to more preparedness. So we see that the responses of policy early on were definitely better. We also see that the European and North American and Latin American countries did not learn from the experiences in the Asia Pacific region, even though this difference of performance was already apparent as early as last March. Because I started writing op-eds all the time saying to Americans, look, the situation is under control in the Asia Pacific. Why don't we do the same things? I can tell you it made almost no difference. I believe if any difference whatsoever, Europe and the United States did not learn from the Asia Pacific in this. So that raises its own puzzles about governance, about the public attitudes, about the culture of our societies that I don't think we can push aside, nor do I think we can definitively solve at this stage. But what do we know? We know that the Asia Pacific countries undertook what came to be called non-pharmaceutical interventions or NPIs. That included all of the usual behavioral steps of wearing face masks, physical distancing, stopping visits, self-isolating with symptoms, but it also involved a very intensive active surveillance system by government where the public health system was tracking each outbreak, looking at the backward contacts to where that infection case may have come from, and looking to the forward contacts of where to whom it may have spread with the idea of understanding the super spreading events on the one hand and stopping the further transmission of the virus on the other hand. So that so-called test, trace, and isolate system was put strongly into place throughout the Asia Pacific region, but it never got into place in Europe and the United States, rather shockingly. At the beginning, the systems were overwhelmed, the preparedness was low, but last summer, after the initial lockdowns, case levels had come down, and one might have thought and expected that our governments in the North Atlantic region of Europe and the U.S. would have said we now introduce, with this lower case load, comprehensive active surveillance means to stop the transmission because we see that in effect has what has been done in the Asia Pacific region. Stopping transmission does not mean zero cases, incidentally, it just means that you have near zero transmission in the community, but new introductions of the disease usually from residents returning from abroad, for example, or people who slip through border controls without symptoms, but then end up introducing new infections. Well, again, the Asia Pacific region did these things, but the U.S. and Europe have to this day never introduced systematic active surveillance. It's rather a catastrophe. I had a theory all during 2020 that the answer was Donald Trump, because we had a psychopath as president, but he went away and we still have not really solved this problem. So, definitively, we're waiting for the magic of the jabs of the vaccines rather than the effective combination of personal behaviors and active surveillance measures, so we still don't have that kind of control system and Europe is back in lockdowns, rather than the active surveillance systems. So, my paper just to come to the conclusion because I'm mostly puzzled, rather than having definitive answers, is to understand both the top down differences of policy performance, and the bottom up differences of societal behavioral actions. And YouGov has given us wonderful data all through the pandemic to understand what people are doing. And suffice it to say in these figures that you can't really see closely, these are behavioral responses where red is the Asia Pacific region and higher means more active response. So you can see that the red squiggles, which are the Asia Pacific countries during the past year, did much more control, whether it's wearing face masks, whether it's quarantining, and so forth, then did the countries in Europe and the United States tracked by the pandemic. Similarly, in the US and Europe, there were many more demonstrations. This is for up to January 2021 demonstrations against wearing face masks or against lockdowns. There was one recorded in Auckland, New Zealand. That's all in the Asia Pacific region. But Europe and the United States had many, many protests. And this is a cultural matter, great resistance to the kind of systematic control efforts that were undertaken successfully in the Asia Pacific region. I've also asked people what they thought about the compliance of citizens in the country and that's shown by the red dots. And the countries with low compliance, by and large, are in the Americas and Europe, whereas the countries with high compliance tend to be in the Asia Pacific countries. So compliance by the public was quite different. Sociologists, cultural students of comparative culture have looked to various measures of individualism as a possible explanation for this different performance. And indeed, if we relate these indexes of individualism to wearing face masks in public, for example, we find significant variation, correlation of higher individualism, meaning lower wearing of face masks, more resistance as well to answering questions of contact tracers on the grounds that they are invading privacy, and so on. One last piece of data that I think is interesting is that if you correlate the measure of compliance or adherence to anti COVID policies, which I showed in this previous graph if you correlate these red dots across country with the score on scientific literacy of 15 year olds across countries that's part of the OECD education evaluation, you also find a very strong relationship that countries with higher science literacy, which tend to be the Asia Pacific countries are much better as well at adherence to public So I believe there's something to this that much of the American public simply doesn't get it. It's the same reason why there's a lot of vaccine resistance. This is susceptible to ignorance, fake news, infodemics that reflects a very poor scientific literacy. And this may be another warning sign for our societies, you may be rich, but if you don't get it, you won't behave properly. And I think that what we're seeing in Europe in the United States is weak policy making bad behavior by the public's and the mutual interaction in both directions. The politicians are afraid of the public, and the public doesn't trust the politicians. The result has been a year of ongoing pandemic, even though we could look back 12 months and see how to stop the transmission. We could have seen it in action, but we refused to look, and therefore we've had another year of agony, compared to what could have been contained already 12 months So let me stop there and turn it back to you, Laura. Thank you very much for that presentation, Jeff. We will continue this conversation with presentation of chapter three in the report by Dr. Woo. Yes. Great. So, it's my honor to be here and present our chapter, COVID-19 prevalence and well being lessons from East Asia. This is a joint work with Maiming Ma from Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, and from KDI School of Public Policy and Management. So after listening to Professor Seck's presentation, I realized we have some overlap with chapter four, but here we are going to provide you with more case studies in East Asia. Let me first summarize our main findings. Our COVID-19 data revealed that the five East Asian regions, mainland China, Hong Kong SAR, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea have much lower infection rates than the major Western societies, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy and Spain. And our quantitative and qualitative analysis shows that strong government response systems, as well as the combination of rigorous non-pharmaceutical and pharmaceutical measures, or contribute to the success in East Asia and the Pacific. Third, we find culture does matter. However, with timely and stringent government policies, COVID-19 can be successfully contained in countries with cultures quite different from those of East Asia. Last but not least, we find having stricter lockdown style policies could in fact considerably offset the decrease in happiness due to the rise in daily new confirmed cases. So first, we provide an overview of the COVID-19 situation in East Asia. And this figure 3.2 from our chapter compares the total case per 100K in five East Asian regions in the study, Australia, New Zealand and the other six Western countries, including France, Germany, Italy, Spain, United Kingdom and the United States. Here we see Australia and New Zealand appear in both panels, so they serve as the reference group. If you look at the vertical axis of both panel, it should be quite straightforward to conclude that those East Asian regions generally had much lower infection rates than the six Western countries. And most strikingly, by the end of 2020, the infection rates of the six Western countries were about 11 to 33 times on the rate of Japan and 340 to 992 times the rate of mainland China. What about Australia and New Zealand? They are indeed the outliers because they are considered Western countries, but they have the infection rates quite similar on to those of East Asian regions rather than those of the six Western countries. And we were also explored the potential reasons for that. Next, we look into the government responses, which we believe should definitely contribute to the low infection rates. We first compare three general dimensions, mobility control and physical distancing policy, testing policies and contact tracing policies in the five East Asian regions and the six Western countries. For lockdown style policies, we find during the initial outbreak, the first East Asian, the five East Asian regions implemented stricter interventions than the four Western countries, including Germany, Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom. And during subsequent waves, we find a few Western countries, especially France, the United Kingdom, and the United States still lacked timely government responses for testing policy. At the earliest stages of the outbreak, South Korea, Hong Kong, SCR, and Taiwan already implemented the most comprehensive testing policy, such as open public testing. And during subsequent waves, all the East Asian regions, except Japan, make testing available to the general public. In comparison, only three out of the six Western countries have similar levels of testing. For contact tracing, we find the four East Asian regions, except Japan, also made much more aggressive and consistent contact tracing efforts. What about Australia and New Zealand? We found Australian and New Zealand had quite comparable contact tracing policies, testing policies, and also physical distancing policies as the East Asia countries from the very beginning of the outbreak. So this may explain why they perform, why the outcome in these two countries were much better than the other six Western countries. Next, we also take a closer look into the government response systems in the five East Asian regions. In the chapter, we actually describe the strengths and specific policies taken by each region, but here, because of the time constraint, I'm going to summarize the key characteristics of the East Asia region. First, the response systems in the five East Asian regions have been under a national-wide directive, and there have been multi-sexual coordination, as well as central local government cooperation. And they all have very strong non-pharmaceutical interventions, including comprehensive mobility controls, extensive testing and contact tracing, mandated quarantine for confirmed cases, suspected cases, closed contacts, and inbound travelers, and they are enforced self-protection practice such as mask wearing. And for pharmaceutical interventions, or the five East Asian regions provide free treatment, and a few of them require hospitalization of mired cases. And we believe civic engagement or civic cooperation also contribute to the low infection rates. According to Hofstede's national culture model, the five East Asian regions have lower levels of individualism, higher levels of long-term orientation, and lower level of indulgence. And those cultural traits are highly related to responsible personal behaviors, including mask wearing, improving personal hygiene, and maintaining physical distance. However, we believe that with decisive and stranger government policies, COVID-19 can be successfully contained in countries with cultures quite different from those of East Asia, such as in Australia and New Zealand. So we tend to conclude government responses might be more important than cultural traits in this battle against the COVID-19. Finally, we look into the effects of infections and actions on emotions. Here, I'm going to briefly describe our data and measures because I think this might be of interest. So our data for mainland China come from nearly 34.5 million microblog tweets posted on the Chinese largest microblog platform Sina Weibo. It covers December 1, 2019 to April the 30th, 2020. And we apply a machine learning approach to generate a city-level expressed happiness index, which ranges from 0 to 100. For the other four East Asian regions, we collect data from Google Trends on relative popularity for well-being related topics, and the data cover December 1, 2019 to August 31, 2020. We derive a negative effect search index by taking the simple average of the relative popularity of six topics of negative effect, and we use this index as a proxy for negative emotions. About the results for mainland China, we find first, a higher number of daily new confirmed cases is associated with a lower level of happiness. And a higher level of daily new recovered cases is associated with a higher level of happiness. What about the policies? We find more stringent lockdown style policies by themselves contributes to a lower level of happiness. However, fortunately, stringent policies could significantly buffer the negative effect of a rise in daily new confirmed cases. For the other four East Asian regions, we find similarly, a rise in daily new confirmed cases is associated with an increase in negative emotions. But stringent policies is associated with a decrease in negative emotions. And also stricter government policies are able to moderate the rise in negative emotions due to the rise in daily new confirmed cases. So here is the main takeaway from our chapter, the timely and strong government policies in East Asia, not only helped to control COVID-19 effectively, but also protected people's happiness during this pandemic. So we hope this chapter can give some policy implications about how to control the pandemic and protect people's happiness. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Dr. Wu. We've received a couple of questions that I will try to consolidate because we are tight on time. So I'll try to pose one or two for both Professor Sacks and Professor Wu. The first is perhaps an opportunity to summarize. We received a couple of questions acknowledging that America and now Europe are hit by a third wave and a request or an inquiry into what governments can do at this time to increase compliance and help contain the pandemic. From our chapter, we learned that non-pharmaceutical interventions are very important. So if there are resurgence in certain countries or regions locked outside policies like workplace closure or school closure, these policies should still be very effective in containing the virus. Wonderful. Thank you.